It appears that Shanghaiceltic is going to have to clarify his problem a little. We seem to be getting more answers here than there were questions.

My first thought was that he's getting extra rests in pickup measures and turnaround measures; but re-looking at the original post my impression was it's just the "extra" blank measures.

When Print Music opens a new score, it fills the page with blank measures, and it was not "intuitive" for me to see how to remove the extras. The "key" is apparently to know that the measures must be selected before they can be deleted - and that the cutesy little choo-choo train is the "selector." The Backspace key to remove the content of a selected measure, vs the Delete key to remove the measure itself might have occured to me if I'd floundered around with it a bit, since a few other programs have similar features; but checking the manual that comes with the program did - in this rare case - turn out to be more efficient than just guessing and punching buttons (or icons).

The handling of repeats and endings in Print Music borders on "bizarre," but does make some sense if you assume that the program was written by MIDI fanatics rather than by musicians(?). You can specify a partial measure for a "pickup" before the first opening repeat bar, and the rests there will go away. The "repeat opening" bar is only a "text notation," and Print Music doesn't recognize it for playback purposes. When you enter the "ending repeat bar," you have to give it "properties" that include specifying a "target measure" (by measure number) to go back to to continue playback.

The "last measure" of the "first time through" - i.e. the measure that contains the "end repeat bar," must be a full measure. You pad it out by including any "pickup notes" for the phrase that is to follow, and target the first full measure in the phrase that's to be repeated - omitting any pickup measure at the beginning of the piece in the repeat.

If you just hide the extra rests the playback will still "play" them, so your "turnaround" between phrases will be off in the playback. Hiding them may be the only way to get a print of the tune in the form - with partial measures at both beginning and end of a repeated phrase - that's often used in folk (and bluegrass) tune notation.

The "structure" of the score produced by Print Music seems to be based on making playback (MIDI) easy, rather than on making the printed notation flexible.

The manual is fairly well written, and is only 323 pages long, so ....

Actually the index and search functions in the manual seem to be good enough that you shouldn't have to rtfm the whole thing, but the controls and settings I've looked at are sufficiently "unintuitive" to suggest being familiar with it so you can look things up.

John